contributing to the community
Sarah Meads
Senior School Leader
VCAL - the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning - at BSC provides practical work-related experience, literacy and numeracy skills as well as the opportunity to build personal skills that are important for life and work.
Like the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), VCAL is an accredited secondary certificate and our proud VCAL students are committed to achieving the very best outcomes from their studies.
This year, the Year 11 VCAL students have enjoyed the fabulous opportunity to work with the CHASE (Community Health Advancement and Student Engagement) Program. CHASE is an innovative, not-for-profit organisation in which mentors partner with secondary schools and community leaders. CHASE provides an opportunity for students to access preventative health knowledge, to empower themselves and to engage with the broader community. This is another chance to develop skills that will benefit the students and the community around them.
Over the course of the school year, CHASE mentors have delivered twelve health-related workshops to BSC Year 11 students. This comprised of two major phases: an Education Phase and an Action Phase. Our students chose to focus on the important community issues of mental health and sexual harassment . With these projects, students were encouraged to make a positive impact on their community so as a means of engaging with the wider school community and raising awareness, students conducted presentations at Year 11 COGS sessions and organised guest speakers to address the entire cohort.
The joint effort of students and their mentors throughout the year was recognised at the recent BSC CHASE Showcase event. The Year 11 students spoke fondly of their journey throughout the CHASE program and how it has given them the ability to overcome public speaking fears, engage in community issues and work in team environments. The CHASE program has proved to be extremely successful, and the students should be proud of their efforts and the way they have represented Brunswick Secondary College!
Michael Lim
CHASE Committee
On behalf of the CHASE Committee, I want to thank the BSC Year 11 VCAL students for hosting a very successful showcase event. The evening really highlighted all the hard work and effort that they put in to the program throughout the year. Many students mastered the skills they need to work effectively within a team, to meet the demands of creating their own community project and to overcome the challenges of speaking to large groups of people. These skills are vital and are going to serve them very well in the future.
I take this opportunity to thank all the Brunswick Secondary College teachers for all their commitment, enthusiasm and patience. Paul Di Masi, Tayler Roberts and Sarah Meads have all done an amazing job throughout the project. A big thank you to BSC Principal, Karen Harris, for her continued support of the CHASE Program. We are looking forward to 2018!
Salvatore Rosagrata
Year 11
CHASE Project
Natasha Quenette, Duh Hashi, Bailey Karllson, Nik Bakalis, Jimmy Manias and I decided to do our CHASE project about Sexual Harassment. We chose to do this project because there is limited information about sexual harassment for our community and it is something that is is not really talked about often with us.
This project helped us to learn how to identify sexual harassment, the effects sexual harassment has on the victim, and just how common are sexual harassment complaints. We also had to work effectively as a team, which was hard at times - but we did it. As well as this, it also showed me how nerve wracking it can be to speak to the entire cohort at COGS!
During our year level COGS assembly we introduced guest speakers, one who was Joanna Williams, from an organisation called Bits & Bods. She gave us insight about what sexual harassment is and how best to respond to it. Natasha Quenette gave a presentation to the students advising them of places they can go to and organisations to contact for help if they have been sexually harassed. I also spoke briefly about a very important law that relates to the issue; the Civil Rights Act 1964, Title VII.
This project not only had a positive influence on myself and my class but on the entire cohort. It has been great for me as it helped me overcome my speaking anxiety; it helped the VCAL class because we have become educated about sexual harassment and learned a lot of organisational and teamwork skills along the way, and it has made an impact on our community as we have been able to share this information with our entire Year 11 cohort.